Retirement Is Too Good To Them

September 5, 1985

BEING PRESIDENT of the United States may not be the best job in the world, but it can lead to better things. Like being an ex-president.

In 1984 taxpayers spent $26 million keeping Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in a style to which all of us would love to become accustomed. In 1986 the tab will increase to an estimated $30.8 million.

They all sat in the Oval Office, surrounded by the pressures that go with leadership in a nuclear world. They all deserve comfortable retirement. But somewhere between the miserly $64,000 spent on Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman in 1955 and the fortune now being squandered there has to be a figure that is fair to the recipients and the citizens who pay the tab.

The $86,200 pensions collected by Nixon, Ford and Carter are nominal. The $204,000 expended on office space for them last year is not. The assignment of 24 Secret Service agents to each ex-president, enough for eight-man shifts around the clock at an annual cost of some $3 million, would seem an exercise in over-protectiveness.

From the petty cash box comes $9,000 a year for stamps. Each. And from the mind-boggling cash box comes $20.5 million for the maintenance of presidential libraries. Nixon has dropped his 24-hour Secret Service protection. Even without that costly benefit, the only man ever to resign the presidency has collected $3.5 million in pension and office payments since he left the White House.

Congress, which has ignored demands to control such costs, should eliminate the Imperial Ex-presidency.